Saturday, November 12, 2005

Friday Night Election Buzz

A few things making news this weekend...

1. Deborah Coyne has announced she will be running against Jack Layton in the upcoming election. Coyne was one of Clyde Wells' key advisors during the Meech Lake saga and I would love to see her tag team with Jean Lapierre on the National Unity file following the next election. Let me just say that it's extremelly refreshing to see someone with a little Trudeau in them running for the Liberals.

2. Speaking of nominations, everyone's favourite nominations blog is back. Check by Nomination Watch to see who the major parties have coerced into giving up their Christmas to campaign. Now someone just needs to get Election Watch going again...

3. Decima has a new poll out: 33-30 Liberals. This is a lot more discouraging for the Grits than the Leger poll released yesterday that had them up by 8, even though both polls were conducted at around the same time. This poll, showing that Canadians do not trust the federal government, shows that the pottential is there for any politician who can build trust.

Be careful comparing different polls. The LM poll and DR poll have very similar liberal numbers -- 34 vs 33 -- but the Conservative numbers were very different. (26 vs. 30) Why? Well, one possibility is that LM includes the Green Party in their poll (and they got 7%), while the DR poll doesn't. The poll results are consistant with the idea that, the 7% of voters who went green in the LM poll but didn't have the option in the DR poll went largely NDP + Conservative.

I think we'll have to wait a couple weeks for the polls to settle down to get a serious measure of what's going on.

I'm more than a bit surprised she's running there, that was a Mills riding, not a Liberal one. A very tough race, but potentially winnable for a non-parachute Liberal. That's for sure a weird spot to stick a 'star' candidate.

She may claim to have moved there, but she's very definitely still living down the street here in good old Ottawa-West Nepean. Wonder why she couldn't run here instead of Lee Farnworth?

But if she wants to run in the City of Toronto, which I'm assuming, where else could she run? It's the only non-Liberal riding in the city and all the incumbents, as far as I know, are running again. I think it's less likely a Martin decision than a question of the reality of Toronto ridings, assuming she wanted to be in Toronto as I said. Because of the party rule changes which gurantee MPs the nomination for the next election, it may have been her only option.

I saw Michael Ignatieff speak on Friday and he mentioned the same issue - where to run (if he ever chose to, wink wink, say no more). Jeffry Simpson on Friday, coincidently, made the same comment.

So Coyne may be jumping at Layton's riding to avoid any other Liberal "star" taking a run at it, being the only Toronto riding open to (so far) unelected Liberals.

However, while Layton barely scraped by with a win in the last election, I think his followers and constituents have seen enough activity from him to give him another trip to Ottawa. Especially when you consider that Mills was campaigning hard and well before the election for that seat and he could only get within 1000 votes.